Fundamentalist teachings on hell owe more to Dante's Inferno than to scripture, but it's a popular incentive to belief (or maybe more exactly, against unbelief). It backfires on fundamentalists because it tends to select the vulnerable, fearful, and guilt-able. That's good for retention, bad for healthy interpersonal relations and good decision-making. It doesn't produce responsible leadership material for running their churches.
They don't see the cognitive dissonance because the only way you wouldn't get out of jail free in their mind is to deliberately turn down a free offer. That is exactly how it was presented to me at the tender age of 5 years and 10 months, and it made sense to my not-yet-six-year-old brain. What I was overlooking is that while, as presented, it's free in the sense you don't have to earn it by being good or something, you have to earn it by acknowledging you're wrong and the doctrines are correct, despite that they make zero sense and are entirely unsubstantiated. So all you're giving up is your intellectual integrity, which is the closest thing you have to a soul.
The other thing you're giving up in the freedom to discover a valid, working epistemology to live by. What you get instead is the failed epistemology of religious faith, which does not lead in the general direction of what passes for truth, and neither explains nor predicts experienced outcomes.
They don't see the cognitive dissonance because the only way you wouldn't get out of jail free in their mind is to deliberately turn down a free offer. That is exactly how it was presented to me at the tender age of 5 years and 10 months, and it made sense to my not-yet-six-year-old brain. What I was overlooking is that while, as presented, it's free in the sense you don't have to earn it by being good or something, you have to earn it by acknowledging you're wrong and the doctrines are correct, despite that they make zero sense and are entirely unsubstantiated. So all you're giving up is your intellectual integrity, which is the closest thing you have to a soul.
The other thing you're giving up in the freedom to discover a valid, working epistemology to live by. What you get instead is the failed epistemology of religious faith, which does not lead in the general direction of what passes for truth, and neither explains nor predicts experienced outcomes.
